Ways of Escape

  It would be easier to draw Kimathi as a heroic figure if we could put out of our minds those bestial ceremonies with the living sheep and the dead goat and the naked woman, or the pictures of mutilated bodies, the white farmer lying hacked wide open in his bath, and the little Ruck boy cut to pieces on his bed beside the toy railway track. Heroes should behave like heroes, and then how easily they would win our allegiance. For over and over again one was moved by the simplicity and pathos of this savage enemy.

  Here are the contents of a young Mau Mau’s box when he was arrested. How far it seems from that world of the three oaths which he had taken, the compulsory circumcision of an eighteen-year-old girl at which he had stood on guard. One essay in English, illustrated by chalk drawings, of the differences between a straight and curved bird’s beak; an essay on the pollination of plants; a third on the difference between an ostrich’s and an eagle’s claw; a simi – the two-edged knife so often used by the Mau Mau; a Scottish hymn book; a Boy Scout belt; a dictation of fifty words, with forty-nine mistakes; three years’ accumulation of letters from a Kikuyu girl, and a careful copy of Hamlet’s speech, ‘To be or not to be.’

  The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

  The pangs of disprised love, the law’s delay,

  The insolence of office …

  It would be romantic to read into this copy more than a school exercise, and yet who knows? A missionary told me that the works of Shakespeare and of the author of the Biggles books were the only forms of imaginative literature to which he had found his pupils attracted.

  And if it would be easy to paint the Mau Mau leaders and followers in too heroic and simple a light, so it would be easy to darken the character of their opponents; for neither the trigger-happy East African Rifles, the European Police nor the Home Guard came out of the struggle unstained. Perhaps, I thought, the worst problems of the future will be the blood feuds surviving the shooting war. In this case the Mau Mau leaders showed a kind of savage statesmanship, for wherever possible they tried to involve the relatives of the murdered in the crime. Both the sister and mother of Chief James, who was killed by ambush in the Fort Hall Reserve, were implicated. The terror of the oath broke down the bond of blood.

  The Home Guard – sometimes armed with nothing better than a spear or a bow – knew the interminable memory of his tribe, and his occasional heroism was more remarkable than his occasional cowardice. Prudence recommended that he should do nothing, but when once his stand had been taken and his spear dipped he had to exact what he could, while he could. Even granted that in this conflict he was likely to prove to be on the successful side, who was going to guarantee his safety in the years of so-called peace when his weapons would have been taken away from him?

  Little wonder that fear sometimes drove him to undiscriminating violence and sometimes to cowardice. There were cases where cattle had been driven away from a boma next door to a Home Guard post without a shot being fired. ‘It’s your cattle we want, not your lives.’

  Because they and their families were under the threat of death it was natural for them to feather the moment’s nest. The repentant Mau Mau oath-taker, the stranger who had fled into the Reserve, gave him his opportunity. The newcomer had been compelled to take the oath; now he hoped to be cleansed from it at a tribal ceremony and settle again, as in the old days, with the past dead and buried, herd his cattle and grow his maize and bananas, grow old in peace, but very soon he found that this past would never be allowed to die.

  The cleansing ceremony had cost him two shillings, but afterwards a confession was required (if he had nothing to confess it was best to invent something – the name of the oath administrator, the names of the askaris who stood on guard outside the hut; unfortunate for some of these if several inventions tallied). The confession was taken down by the Home Guard and presented to a Council of Elders who must be entertained, and for this twenty shillings perhaps would be required of him.

  Worse still his name was now on a list; he could be made the scapegoat for any crime that happened in his district. Next time the Home Guard on their nocturnal patrol visited his shamba, perhaps a hundred shillings would be needed to buy them off. If he was beaten by the loyal Home Guard, who would defend an ex-Mau Mau?

  The Home Guard increased his own danger with every exaction and always at the back of his mind was the fear of the future. He, too, like the oath-breakers of the fourth degree, had separated himself; he had the praise of the white men and the official chiefs and headmen, but white men have short memories, they do not harbour blood feuds, and officials change.

  He listened to the Indian radio. Pamphlets from Indian sources told him that the great Indian Nehru was once in a British prison and now ruled his country. In the forest the Mau Mau fighter dreamed of a Messiah’s return and in the Reserve the Home Guard had his terrified nightmare of That Man, Kenyatta.

  When Jomo Kenyatta won his first appeal on a technicality, depression lay over the Kikuyu Reserve; there was no man except the Mau Mau fighter who did not dread his return. Better than several battalions of British troops, I thought then, would be the announcement by the Kenyan Government that, whatever the result of Kenyatta’s appeal, expedience dictated that he should never be allowed to live in Kenya.

  The guilt or innocence of Kenyatta was not involved. The world is wide enough and it was for the good of Kenya that one man should finish his life outside its borders. One decisive and spectacular act such as this, I thought, might cure the worst ill from which Kenya suffered – the sense of indecision.

  Indecision ruled the Government before the Emergency and it ruled the Emergency because it is part of the modern mind. We have lost the power of clear action because we have lost the ability to believe.

  Even a surrender offer addressed to the gang leaders was so drafted that it could be explained away as meaning little at all. Badly timed – for offers of surrender terms should surely come after successes and not reversals – it seemed to mean little more than, ‘Come in, waving your green branches, and if you have been implicated in murder you will be tried by all the usual processes of law and hanged; otherwise you can trust to our justice and merely fill our overloaded prisons.’ That was not the intention, but between the thought and the act had fallen the shadow of indecision – how would the loyal Kikuyu who had lost wives and children regard an amnesty, how would the settler when he remembered the murder of the Ruck family?

  Indecision is not understood by the African mind. It irritates him in the smallest details of his life. How often was the complaint made by a Kikuyu that one year he was told his wattle-trees had to be grown nine feet apart, another year seventeen feet, and then again nine, that one year the terracing of his sloping acres had to be done one way, another year differently? The idea of truth developing through trial and error is alien to the African – one may say that he is nearer to the Catholic with his deposit of faith than he is to the scientific inquirer. His own tribal framework with its elaborate customs gave him a sense of the unchanging; the European had broken that up and had so far given little in return.

  The Protestant missionaries offered him rites apt to vary with each individual missionary, just as agricultural policy varied with every agricultural officer. The Government offered schools free from what idealists considered the excrescences of religious teaching and it was the African who brought religious teaching back in a strange and garbled form into the independent schools founded by Jomo Kenyatta after the Protestant missionaries had refused to allow the girls in their schools to be circumcised in the tribal fashion.

  For the Kikuyu – you can tell it even in the grim sad ritual of the oath – is deeply religious. It is not the European who brought God to Africa; too often he has driven Him out. ‘Of course we believe in God,’ a Kikuyu said to a priest of my acquaintance. ‘Everybody does. Don’t we say, “God” when we cut our finger?’

  In the Fort Hall Reserve I was being guided to a Home Guard post by a young Kikuyu, t
he son of a chief condemned to death by Mau Mau. ‘Where is your revolver?’ he asked me. I told him I didn’t possess one. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I see you trust in the kindness of God.’

  A priest said to me: ‘They ask unanswerable questions. They say to me: “Didn’t God make a land for each people to live in, black and white, and didn’t he put the sea between us so that we shouldn’t interfere with each other?”’

  It is impossible not to love these people when you don’t fear them. They have a vivid and direct imagery; when they talk of the soul it is as if they saw it – the soul goes up this way and down that and they can report its progress.

  A Kikuyu was condemned to death for being found in possession of gelignite. He had had it for many years he said, for medical purposes; and the judge believed his story and while formally sentencing him indicated the likelihood of a reprieve. A priest visited his wife to comfort her with the news of his probable safety. ‘I hope you are right, Father,’ she said. ‘My soul is like a clock that goes round and round, but if he dies it will stop right there for ever,’ and she showed him the hour of twelve.

  There was one odd thing about the condemned Mau Mau. Nine out of ten became Catholics in the condemned cell when hope was over. Perhaps it was the personality of one Irish priest who began instructing them as soon as they had been sentenced and spent the last night in the cell with them. The Attorney-General walking round the prison one night in Nyeri saw a white man squatting on the floor of the condemned cell with three Africans sitting round him. It was the Father.

  At Nyeri there was an attempted prison break from the condemned cell; troops cordoned the cell: tear-gas was used, and at last the prisoners made their final conditions. They would die quietly if the priest would come in to them: they wanted beer and baptism.

  ‘They die like angels,’ this priest said to me. ‘I don’t often see Europeans die so well.’ When so many hundred times you have had to descend into the pit below the gallows to give the last rites to the broken-necked carrion lying there, each body becomes the body of an individual. You are in a different world from the courtroom at Githenguri with the rows of numbered black figures from which justice – with often insufficient means – tries to separate what we call the guilty from what we call the innocent.

  British justice was not a sufficient gift to the Kikuyu people to win them for the future. There is an English axiom that justice should not only be done, but that it should be seen to be done. That condition was almost impossible under the Emergency. Nor was a progressive agricultural policy enough, nor a secular education. To take the place of the lost tribal discipline the Kikuyu sought another discipline, and other sacraments in place of their own tribal sacrifices.

  For good or ill the future of the Kikuyu seemed to me then to depend on religion – either they would be won by the Christianity of the priest in the execution pit or by the strange faith of Kenyatta’s independent schools where they were taught that there was a white God and a white Bible and every text had a secret meaning which the African was not expected to notice. ‘Eyes have you and see not’ – this means, their teachers said, that you cannot see what these white people and their white God intend for you and your children, while the black God lay in hiding like the Mau Mau in the bamboo forest.

  4

  My stay in Kenya brought me unexpectedly in contact with a friend whom I had not known since I left Oxford. How little we change. We are pursued through life by our shadow which caricatures us but which only our friends notice. We are too close to pay it any attention, even when it quite outrageously plays the clown, exaggerating our height in the evening and dwarfing us at the midday hour. And then there are those lines stamped on the left hand … I wonder whether, if our tracks about the globe were visible at one glance from a god’s point of view, they would not have the same designs as they have on the palm. In my case perhaps African rivers run down below the thumb, and a skirmish in Indo-China lies where the cross is formed below the mount of Venus.

  These are thoughts which rise whenever my old friend Robert Scott comes to mind. He was one of my greatest friends at Oxford, but I lost touch with him completely for nearly thirty years. One day I arrived in Nairobi to report the Mau Mau rebellion and forty-eight hours later a message was left at my hotel that the High Commissioner for East Africa wished to see me at his office. He was sending his car and his secretary.

  In the car I asked his secretary the High Commissioner’s name. ‘Sir Robert Scott.’ The last time I had heard of Robert he was a Colonial Secretary in Palestine. Scott is a common name. It seemed unlikely that this was my old friend.

  ‘Sir Robert has asked me to show you straight in.’

  It was indeed Robert. He sat in the enormous gleaming room completely unchanged, Gaelic, dark, brooding, somehow nervous, behind his great bare desk, fingering a pipe. At Oxford he had always fingered a pipe as though it kept him by a finger’s breadth in touch with reality, because the odd thing about this heavy blunt figure, who always seemed to speak with some reluctance, after a long pondering, with a gruff Scottish accent, was that at any moment he was liable to take flight into the irrelevant, irrational world of fantasy.

  ‘Robert!’ I exclaimed.

  It was as if we had been whirled simultaneously into that Oxford past. At Balliol I had sometimes teased him mercilessly. Coming from a Scottish university, he seemed much older than I was, and his pipe gave him in my eyes an air of bogus wisdom against which I reacted. A puff was the excuse for a long laconic silence. If I hadn’t teased him I might have been in danger of accepting him as an authority on life, and that would have been rash indeed.

  For instance there had been the affair of the young barmaid of the Lamb and Flag in St Giles’s whom we all agreed resembled in her strange beauty the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti. What quantities of beer we drank in order to speak a few words with her. We were too young and scared to proceed further, and more than a month of one summer passed before I realised how the slow pipe-smoking wiseacre Robert had succeeded beyond any of us. He was regularly taking her out on her day off in a punt on the Isis and reading her translations from Ronsard. His own translations, for like myself he wrote verse in those days – very traditional verse, but unlike me he was lucky enough not to find a publisher. They might not have done well for his future in the Colonial Office, and anyway who would need a publisher when he had Nefertiti as an audience?

  One evening he came to see me. He was even more laconic than usual and puffed a great deal at his pipe. He wanted my advice, he said, and that surprised me, for it had usually been his part to give advice. Apparently Nefertiti had threatened to write to the Dean of Balliol and complain of his conduct.

  ‘What have you done to her?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s why she’s complaining.’

  Nevertheless the danger was serious. The Dean, known as ‘Sligger’, was not a man to sympathise with a heterosexual dilemma. I was at a loss what to advise.

  ‘I have thought of a plan,’ Robert said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll invite her to tea, and while she’s coming up the stairs I’ll lean over the banisters and empty a glass of water on her.’

  ‘But, Robert … surely that will only make things worse.’

  ‘I can think of nothing else,’ he said sadly.

  A few weeks later he called on me again. ‘It worked,’ he said.

  ‘What worked?’

  ‘The glass of water.’

  I looked at him in amazement. A douche of cold water … no more Ronsard … it seemed to me he must have tapped some deep source of irrational Celtic wisdom. The Lamb and Flag lost a group of customers, but there was no complaint to the Dean.

  I remember another illustration of his strange irrationality, which was never apparent in the rather pedestrian essays he read aloud at tutorials (we had the same tutor, Kenneth Bell, who was often impatient with the slow impeccable logic of Scott’s prose leading to a judgement which
condemned once again the errors of Henry VIII or the frivolity of the Young Pretender). A number of us in a manic mood had decided to enliven the little town of Wallingford. I chose to go as an artist drawing souls in the marketplace at sixpence a time. The future father of the House of Commons, Robin Turton, was one of us, but I can’t remember what part he played, though I think he was dressed in an officer’s uniform of some foreign power. Robert, who could already boast grey hairs, went as a middle-aged clergyman who was hunting for a runaway wife. He called at the rectory and took tea with the sympathetic wife of the rector in her husband’s absence. She urged him to be generous and forgive, and after tea they prayed together. As we returned to Oxford he added a detail to his story. ‘When she went out of the room to find her prayer book I left a bunch of bananas in the grand piano.’

  ‘Bananas? What on earth for?’

  ‘It seemed the right thing to do.’

  Now in Nairobi the High Commissioner looked nervously at me over the great bare desk. Was he too thinking back into that absurd past? He asked me to stay with him. He had a house on the outskirts of Nairobi. ‘Scotch baronial,’ he said shyly, perhaps afraid that I would laugh.

  But I had hired a car with an African driver and was leaving next day for the Kikuyu Reserve. ‘I’ll be coming back in a week or two,’ I promised.

  It was nearly a month before I returned to Nairobi and rang up the High Commissioner’s office.

  ‘Sir Robert is not at the office,’ I was told. ‘He is not well.’